An infantile openness to the world rests on instinct, not trust.

Evidence

We would not accept Lohengrin on his word, we would want evidence. An account of the life of the infant and its necessary dependency might seem cogent as an account of how we come psychologically to be able to trust or to know (as argued in chapter 5). That is not an account of what trust is or of how it works, however. It is not only preadult, it is prehuman. It is plausibly the way an infant bird works, turning a wide-open mouth to the sky with an instinct behaviorally equivalent to acting on trust that good things will fall into it. In the survival lottery, this works for at least some number of the instinctively openmouthed. Even at poor odds of survival with a dumbly open mouth, however, opening up is more beneficial than keeping the mouth closed, which guarantees starvation. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 358

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hardin distinguishes instinctual openness (prehuman, noncognitive) from genuine trust, which requires grounds in the other’s character.